What can I say - I'm a Pepperony fan.
A few feels attacks plus a couple of well-timed gifsets on Tumblr inspired me. I thought it might be fun to expand my pairing-repertoire, so to speak, and this lil ficlet was born.
Happy Valentine's Day!
After Afghanistan, everything had changed.
He'd seen the weapons that he had created in the hands of terrorists. He'd seen those weapons used to harm innocent people. He'd been ambushed and captured and forced to build a weapon that would be used against the people he was trying to protect. He'd been starved and abused; he'd had a chunk of metal implanted in his chest, and he'd watched a good man die to save his life.
Afghanistan changed everything. It changed his view of Stark Industries and its questionable achievements. It brought into sharp relief the chasm between his stated goals and the reality of their disastrous effects. It irreversibly changed the way he saw himself – his merits, his deep flaws, his wrongheaded convictions.
And somehow, inexplicably, it even changed the way he looked at her.
He'd never realized it, but she'd always been there for him, in a way that even Obi and Happy hadn't. In a way that not even his parents could be anymore. She understood him better than anyone, and even though she knew more about him than anyone else did, all his flaws and his weaknesses and promiscuous habits, her patience with him and loyalty to him had never wavered. She was all he had, he realized – the only person he knew he could always depend on. And it occurred to him that her safety was more important to him than anything else in the world.
So when he stepped off the plane, tired and starved and aching, the first thing he did was to go to her. She was beaming at him like there was no other face she would rather be looking at, and he wanted to tell her how good it was to see her again, and how much he appreciated what she did for him, and how he was just starting to realize how much she really meant to him.
But he didn't know how. He wasn't good with emotions, much less communicating them. All he knew about real, sincere emotions was how to bury them deep – deep enough to convince himself that they weren't there at all.
"Your eyes are red," he said instead, trying to lighten the mood. "A few tears for your long-lost boss?"
"Tears of joy," she returned, smiling as she dropped her gaze. "I hate job-hunting."
Everything was changing – his beliefs, his perspectives, his ambitions, and even his relationship with his woman he'd come to respect so much.
But if there was one good thing his father had taught him, it was that change wasn't always a bad thing. And his ordeal may have ended, but this didn't feel like an ending.
It felt like the start of something amazing.
(To my Clintasha people who saw the updated and expected a clintnat story: Don't worry, I'm posting a Clintasha oneshot tomorrow just for you guys. :)